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Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

mun-logadan.github.io

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Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#281
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. I just re-checked. 4.8 and 5 gave a blatantly wrong answer to a simple question, 4.6, Quen, GLM, Sol gave the right answer. They messed up somehow, not sure what they did.

What was the question?

(effort: high)

"can the pi 4 use the usb-c port as powered host port when the board is powered via gpio?"

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find Deepseek's house style to be pretty refreshing. It has its own cliches (it does like talking about "seams") but I don't think I've ever caught it saying "load-bearing". I've even watched its thinking where after analyzing some awful legacy code, it started off with "Holy crap". And it certainly doesn't over-comment. I definitely can't one-shot a complex system with it like Fable can, but I prefer iterating ove…

>it does like talking about "seams" Sounds like it was trained heavily on Opus 4.7.

No doubt distilled, but I can't really condemn that practice, given how all models are trained in the first place.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the tip that was floating around on x was to tell it to use "ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English" cladue desktop has an instructions sections under general options, you can put something like "try to stick to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, keep answers short and to the point" funnily enough the placeholder they suggest when its empty is "keep answers short and to the point"

CLAUDE.md is mostly powerless against the reinforcement learned crap. I'm up to three separate instructions telling it to cut out the hyper verbose, retelling history comments and it still writes them every time.

Claude Code has an "output styles" setting that supposedly directly modifies the system prompt:

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#284
post #12

The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically. Sentences that orbit a point, then jump to it like it's a revealed insight. Unnecessarily abstract phraseology. Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice, especially when it helps construct a sentence where the real action can 'land' like a surprise at the end. It is definitely mo…

> The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically. This is even more painful for non-native English speakers like myself. I feel fairly comfortable reading academic papers or in general, communicating in professional context. But with Opus 5, it feels like reading a literature book: load-bearing, inert, wholesale, hunk, verbatim, and so on... I can figure out the meaning, but working with…

As a native speaker, it feels like reading an impression of a literature book by a high school English class’s most overconfident student who’s only ever read LinkedIn-speak.

Anyway, you might have more luck just writing to it in your native language. It’ll be equally crummy, but maybe you’ll find it easier to decode.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#285
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> writes too elliptically > Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice Wow, what a great way of phrasing this. Thanks for word-smithing what I've been wanting to express for so long.

This just mimics what I call BusinessBro™ speech. It also goes the other way, they use verbs as nouns. "I know this is a big ask". "The solve for that is that we can...." When it was just my product owner in tech meetings, I'd mock him relentlessly "There's already a word for that, it's 'request'" or "Are you sure you didn't mean 'SOLUTION'?? words are hard man". (This was all in good fun, I still love the guy to pie…

Which is worse, when people noun verbs, or when they verb nouns?

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sentences that orbit a point, then jump to it like it's a revealed insight. Is this inside the thinking tokens, or the output? As this type of stuff is expected for thinking, because of the whole CoT / “think step by step” works, as this is optimal for the way LLMs work with attention and next word prediction. So the fact that it first “orbits” a point only to get to the conclusion afterwards is the system working…

It's the output.

And you enabled thinking?

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#290
post #12

The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically. Sentences that orbit a point, then jump to it like it's a revealed insight. Unnecessarily abstract phraseology. Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice, especially when it helps construct a sentence where the real action can 'land' like a surprise at the end. It is definitely mo…

Oh yes - exactly this. The way it articulates re-factors in my current project has got so elliptical I've had to start asking it to translate into human speak - it's like it evolves it's own language to talk about the project. I've lost count of the number of times I've asked it to reenforce in memory not to use such verbose comments - and the number of times I ask it to re-look at an assumption it's made for it to return saying "investigation complete. And it's not what either of us was expecting"....
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